To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or receive this book,
and to the reviewers also (to whom it is of triple profit),
greeting - and whatever else can be had for nothing.
If you should ask how this book came to be written, it was in this
way. One day as I was wandering over the world I came upon the valley
where I was born, and stopping there a moment to speak with them
all - when I had argued politics with the grocer, and played the great
lord with the notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter a
Christian by force of rhetoric - what should I note (after so many
years) but the old tumble-down and gaping church, that I love more
than mother-church herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble, and
new, as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing very well that
such a change had not come from the skinflint populace, but was the
work of some just artist who knew how grand an ornament was this
shrine (built there before our people stormed Jerusalem), I entered,
and there saw that all within was as new, accurate, and excellent as
the outer part; and this pleased me as much as though a fortune had
been left to us all; for one's native place is the shell of one's
soul, and one's church is the kernel of that nut.
Moreover, saying my prayers there, I noticed behind the high altar a
statue of Our Lady, so extraordinary and so different from all I had
ever seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that I was quite
taken out of myself and vowed a vow there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage
and see all Europe which the Christian Faith has saved; and I said, 'I
will start from the place where I served in arms for my sins; I will
walk all the way and take advantage of no wheeled thing; I will sleep
rough and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass every
morning; and I will be present at high Mass in St Peter's on the Feast
of St Peter and St Paul.'
Then I went out of the church still having that Statue in my mind, and
I walked again farther into the world, away from my native valley, and
so ended some months after in a place whence I could fulfil my vow;
and I started as you shall hear. All my other vows I broke one by one.
For a faggot must be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I
kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, and I heard high
Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, as many can testify - to wit:
Monsignor this, and Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of
_so-and-so - o - polis in partibus infidelium;_ for we were all there
together.
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